[buro9]

A possible advantage of a machine readable definition of who should be paid within a repo is to then integrate it with how to spread payment across multiple repos.

Most large companies run a licence check across all dependencies, i.e. things like Veracode SCA License reports already list all third party dependencies and lookup licence information... if such tools were adapted (or a new tool created) that allowed you to use that as a billing mechanism it would make sense that just as you can programmatically lookup licences you could lookup who to pay.

Going further... it could encourage dual-licensing by default with the OSS licence being viral unless paid for... so on the report that says you're at risk because it's GPL it could detect that payment can be made to obtain the code under some other terms.

The basics of the proposal aren't bad... it proposes that there is a machine readable definition of how payments should be shared and made... however there's still a lot that needs to be done to make that useful, the upside is that some of that becomes more obvious.